Talking pirate...

Aaaarrrrgggghhhh! By the time I got to hear about Talk like a Pirate Day it was almost over. Avasssstttt! It seems like I miss a lot of things these days, maybe I should avast more and stop living my life quite so retrospectively - savvy?  Oh well, too late now I was well and truly scuttled. Shiver me timbers though, talking like a pirate for the day would have been such fun me hearties.

Pirates were one of the four play staples (sorry about the innuendo madam) when I was of an age for playing. The other three being cops and robbers, spacemen and of course cowboys. These days, with the inexplicable demise of the western series on the box (which isn’t actually a box at all but flat these days), I’m not sure that there are many cowboy kids around which makes me wonder just who the Milky bars are on.

I guess there may be a few spacemen (Buzz Lightyear or Doctor Who related play characters) and I expect that when kids play cops they are very polite, only carry guns in hostage situations, and spend most of their time writing up reports back at the station. The poor robbers on the other hand are probably victims of society from broken homes who take illegal substances on prescription, wear hoodies, rap and meet regularly with their social workers. Whatever happened to Raffles?

Of course back then we could all talk fluent pirate, cowboy, cop, robber and spaceman at the drop of a hat, bandana, eye-patch, swag-bag, mask, or helmet. Yep, we were all multi-lingual lingo-ists back then.

 Ahoy, me Hearties, batten down the hatches you Bilge-sucking dogs or I’ll pass’ee the spot, thar’s a posse of Sheriff’s men waiting in the Last Chance saloon pard and a rope with your name on it a’hanging in the jail-house, affirmative mission control – stop -  am firing boosters now – stop - we have ignition -stop, it’s a fair cop guvnor I’ll come quietly…

Anyway, you get the idea.

Sometimes I wonder what kids today do play, or if they play at all. It must be hard to have fun playing Eastenders or Grand Designs, and I’d have no idea how to make a game out of The ‘X’ Factor – maybe you just dress flamboyantly and screech into a hairbrush. Perhaps they pretend to be Gordon Ramsey, whipping up a soufflé from ingredients ‘borrowed’ from Tesco and shouting the ‘F’ word at their friends.

It was easier when TV was all Dixon, Rawhide, Fireball XL5 and Captain Pugwash. You knew where you stood and how to play the game. For a while we all played Noggin the Nog - ‘fair iz moi flyun shop?’ - but we tired of that pretty quickly. Another time we were all Daleks with sink plungers and ‘sore throat’ voices. You didn’t need to be much of a linguist to be a Dalek, ‘exterminate’ was about all that was really required.

Yes, I could ramble on for hours about the games that I used to play, but I won’t. Instead I’ll leave you with this, a saying I used to say all the time back then when playing pirates… ‘Ye can swab the poop deck, but ye can't poop on the swab deck.’ Well, it always used to get a laugh. See you all in Davie Jones' Locker me hearties.